Having thus made a hurried survey of some of the more instructive,
racial, and national problems abroad we now return homewards to apply
the knowledge thus gained to the understanding of the national
manifestations of our own countrymen. There is no need to remind you
that the national spirit of Robert Boyle's native country is always
boiling up, often boiling over. Scotland, too, has a national spirit, so
has Wales; in both countries this spirit is separatist in its essence,
but the national instinctive tendencies are curbed and guided by the
higher reasoning centres of the brain. In England itself the sense of
nationality is usually dormant; only an insult or a threat from without
stirs this gigantic force into life. In Ireland the national kettle is
kept always on the boil; in Scotland and Wales it is kept simmering; in
England, on the other hand, it dozes quietly on the hob. Nevertheless
English nationality is a force which pervades the whole population lying
between Berwick-on-Tweed and Land's End. In the course of centuries
statesmanship has succeeded in raising up in the minds of all the
inhabitants of the British Isles--all save in the greater part of
Ireland--a new and wider sense of nationality, a spirit of British
nationality. Why we never succeeded in raising that spirit in the whole
of Ireland represents the major part of our present quest.